Apart from Penang Hill, I was able to visit a few places during my short stay on Penang island last year. Except for the central business district, the town centre’s built environment is not too congested; there are still many blocks where single- and double-storey buildings are the tallest constructions.
Elevators are conspicuously missing the fourth floor (and floors with four in their number). As you can see from the panel below, what would normally be 4 has become 3A … and similarly with the floors at ten and twenty levels above that. This is due mainly to Chinese superstition and fear of the number (tetraphobia), as the word for four sounds similar to the word for death in some dialects. (For a parallel, the number 13 is considered to be an unlucky number in some cultures.)
Superstition notwithstanding, the only problems with the elevators that I ran into was the same as anywhere else in the world—not enough of them in a given location to provide a convenient service.
One notable place I visited was the Wonderfood Museum; food is an important part of many cultures, and certainly in eastern Asian cultures. The museum has many displays of simulated foods and plenty of information for the visitor to take in. The displays are static, but well done and accompanied by informative panels.
At first glance, that last food display looks like a mess on a table. Take a closer look at that last display, and from a different angle.
In case you do not see the connection between the replica of the Mona Lisa portrait (by Leonardo da Vinci) and the display on the table, here is the display from a slightly different angle.
Much depends on the perspective you have on something. We can extend this to the photograph below, where the subject (a clock tower) caught my eye as I was passing by. It seemed an elegant piece of architecture, and only later did I discover that this was the Queen Victoria Memorial Clock Tower—also known as the Jubilee Clock Tower—constructed to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897.
Why is it officially the ‘memorial’ clock tower? Perhaps it is because Queen Victoria died in 1901, a few years after her Diamond Jubilee, and just a year before the tower was completed in 1902.
No visit to Malaysia would be complete without a visit to a durian stall. The pungent fruit tends to be either well loved or well despised, depending on one’s tastes.
If we were to plot degree of liking against frequency in a broad sample of people, we would probably see a bimodal distribution—a significant cluster of observations around two focal points, with relatively few observations elsewhere on the chart.
The top of the building where I was staying afforded more views of the surrounding town, the sea, and Penang Hill.
There are many places to eat in Penang, and in the limited time I had, there was one establishment that I visited twice: Kenny Hills Bakers. The food and the service were both excellent.
To finish, I shot some cityscapes at night. The scene below is the same as in the photograph at the beginning of this post, but late in the evening.
Not having a tripod with me, and shooting without any electronic stabilisation (whether lens- or sensor-based), the old school approach applied:
- open the lens aperture as much as possible (in this case, around f/4) to let in as much light as possible;
- focus on a middle to distant point to maximise depth of field (not too much of an issue for this shot, as there were no near objects to focus on anyway);
- boost sensor sensitivity as high as possible (in this case, ISO 1600);
- use as stable a posture as possible (here, I was actually leaning firmly against a wall with my shooting arm, while my supporting arm was resting securely on a balcony wall—with the camera itself held securely against my face, of course); and
- trigger the shutter release as smoothly as possible (breath held calmly, with a rolling squeeze of the shutter release [rather than a stabbing action] to minimise camera and lens motion).
As always, these factors are in balance with each other; more technical capability in one factor would allow me to push performance on that factor, and so support use of a more conservative setting in another factor—for better overall performance.